The film follows Tadesse Meskela, an Ethiopian man on a mission to save his 74,000 struggling coffee farmers from bankruptcy. As his farmers strive to harvest some of the highest quality coffee beans on the international market, Tadesse travels the world in an attempt to find buyers willing to pay a fair price. Against the backdrop of Tadesse’s journey to London and Seattle, the enormous power of the multinational players that dominate the world’s coffee trade becomes apparent. New York commodity traders, the international coffee exchanges, and the double dealings of trade ministers at the World Trade Organisation reveal the many challenges Tadesse faces in his quest for a long term solution for his farmers (Source: Anon 2010).

Scenes in the film switch between the disadvantaged coffee farming communities to the daily lives of those at the luxury to consume it, which often exemplifies the absurdity found in those gushing about the great wealth of a market built off the backs of farmers who continue to live in poverty (Source: Reed 2008).

The spokesman, Tadesse Meskela, who is the subject of Black Gold, together with the film’s English makers, brothers Nick and Marc Francis, are a serious irritant to some of the world’s coffee giants – in particular Seattle-based Starbucks, whose annual turnover of $7.8bn (£4bn) is not much lower than Ethiopia’s entire gross domestic product… ‘Our people are barefoot, have no school, no clean water or health centre. They are living hand to mouth. We need $4 a pound minimum, that’s only fair…Starbucks may help bring clear water for one community but this does not solve the problem. In 2005, Starbucks’ aid to the third world was $1.5m. We don’t want this kind of support, we just want a better price. They make huge profits; giving us just one payment of money does not help,’ said Mr. Meskela (Source: Seager 2007 link).

By way of the farmers in the cooperative and Tadesse’s efforts on their behalf, the film exposes the web of trade regulations that keep farmers in developing countries poor, even while transnational corporations in the global north prosper. Women painstakingly sort millions of beans; and viewers observe the hunger and substandard housing that accompany poverty. Juxtaposed with these images are the cosmopolitan cafés of Europe and America, the comfort of conspicuous consumption, the places of commerce where deprivation in one part of the globe is turned into the wealth of another (Source: Fellner 2008 link).’

‘When Marc and Nick Francis were making Black Gold, they never expected the story – about the plight of African coffee farmers paid a fraction of the amount a latte or cappuccino costs – to attract the very multinationals the film criticises. ‘They want to hear what the audience thinks,’ Nick Francis says. ‘We had this screening in Seattle, and the head of corporate responsibility of Starbucks came to the screening and participated in a panel and answered questions from the audience. That’s what you call the power of film – how a film could draw in people.’ … The film has prompted rounds of crisis management sessions at coffee-shop chains such as Starbucks, which issued a statement calling the film inaccurate and incomplete. Since the film’s release, the chain has also actively promoted a new range of ‘Fair Trade’ coffee in its outlets around the world, including those in Hong Kong. The filmmakers are surprised by the chain’s response to their film. ‘It’s not a film about Starbucks, it’s a film about coffee farmers struggling to survive in the coffee industry, and their story is set against the backdrop of the coffee-consuming world of the west, of which Starbucks is a part,’ Marc Francis says. ‘We didn’t tell it so much about them but they’ve taken it very personally. Also, we did spend six months trying to interview not just Starbucks but other big multinational coffee companies to bring their side of the stories to the film. But they’ve given us no response. Now that the film is out there and is beginning to pick up public momentum, the companies are responding more and more to the film – or trying to show [through] public relations where they position themselves’ (Source: Tsui 2007a).

’Black Gold’ portrays the coffee industry as a whole, rather than Starbucks specifically. From our point of view, this film is inaccurate and incomplete, as it does not explain how Starbucks purchases coffee, nor does it provide any reference to potential solutions to the world coffee crisis… Starbucks takes an integrated approach to coffee purchasing. Our goal is to pay premium prices that provide the coffee farmer with a profit. In our financial year 2006, we paid an average price of $1.42 per pound for our coffee, 40% above the commodity price and comparable with the guaranteed Fairtrade price of $1.26. Our approach… [has] been recognised for…leadership within the industry (Source: Starbucks 2007).

We are surprised that Starbucks have gone out to discredit the film again. This is not a film specifically about Starbucks, it’s a film about the winners and losers in the global coffee industry and it shows the daily reality for millions of coffee farmers. We spent six months during the production trying to persuade Starbucks to participate in the film to give them the opportunity to explain how they buy their coffee and how they work in Ethiopia, but they declined our invitation. In a subsequent meeting with five senior Starbucks executives at their Seattle headquarters, we asked them to tell us the exact price they pay farmers for a pound of coffee – but they refused to disclose this (Source: Francis & Francis 2007 link).

During the film’s most painful sequence, his [Tadesse’s] efforts and Ethiopia’s persistent, crushing famine are juxtaposed with the vapidly cheerful corp-speak of two Starbucks baristas (Source: Hornaday 2006).

Yes, the baristas are excessively perky as they purvey coffee and the Starbucks experience; yet they are also model employees, supportive of each other, efficient, and proud of their company. At the time of the filming, the young women were entertaining a tour from the Specialty Coffee Association, to which the filmmakers had attached themselves to avoid asking Starbucks or its employees for permission to film. How could these young women know that they would be featured as unwitting symbols of the harm that transnational coffee giants inflict on poor Ethiopian farmers? (Source: Fellner 2008 link).

The Francis brothers are good on showing the situation’s local effects – famine, ill-equipped schools – but less so at analyzing the international economic context: the film is frighteningly free of expert voices. More dynamism and knowledge in the telling and fewer cheap shots at young Starbucks workers in Seattle wouldn’t have gone amiss (Source: Calhoun 2007, np).

The baristas and shopkeepers that the film ridicules through artful editing are the very people who are the farmers’ best hope for teaching the public about the true value of these coffees (Source: Marshall 2006 link).

While it may prompt some to think again next time they’re in Starbucks, this astute insight into the coffee business is better at lauding the good guys than taking the multinationals to task for the iniquities of the global economy (Source: Parkinson 2006 link).

Although some scenes register with strong impact, there also seems to be a lot of padding, and the overall narrative is ultimately too diffused and unfocused for the film to have the sociological impact it so obviously desires (Source: Scheck 2006).

Compared to a documentary like Darwin’s Nightmare, which found disturbing visual analogues for the moral rot of global trade, Black Gold makes most of its points in words, not pictures. (Source: Murray 2006 link)

The movie’s approach reminds me that of the paternalistic and Western-centred [sic] 1970s-style theories according to which only colonialism and international market (i.e. ‘us’ the Western world) are to blame, and no others’ power and responsibilities are recognised. Likewise, there is no mention in the movie of the roles that the Ethiopian State could play in economic development and, for instance, education (Source: Chiari 2007 link).

[I] found it confusing to people outside the coffee field, partial, and intellectually not particularly honest…In my opinion, the film completely overlooks factors such as historical events (the Mengistu dictatorship which ruined plantations and the coffee free flow), inept procedures such as the bureaucracy surrounding the auctions system which hardly allows enough time for buyers to evaluate the lots), and also the ever present corruption, probably less in Ethiopia than in other parts of Africa, but then why generalize in the end with statements about Africa’s share of world trade? (Source: cofyknsult 2006 link).’

Doane, M. (2010) Relationship coffees. Structure and agency in the fair trade system. in Lyon, S. and Moberg, M. (eds) Fair trade and social justice: global ethnographies. New York: New York University Press

This investigative film produced by CI’s corporate watchdog partner DanWatch reveals how a staggering 500,000 used PCs arrive in Lagos every month – 75% of which go straight to landfill. This is just the tip of the 6.6 million tons of European e-waste dumped on the developing world every year, despite international bans.

Reviews/discussion

Greenpeace’s supporting discussion:

How does it get to Ghana?

Containers filled with old and often broken computers, monitors and TVs – from brands including Philips, Canon, Dell, Microsoft, Nokia, Siemens and Sony – arrive in Ghana from Germany, Korea, Switzerland and the Netherlands under the false label of “second-hand goods”. Exporting e-waste from Europe is illegal but exporting old electronics for ‘reuse’ allows unscrupulous traders to profit from dumping old electronics in Ghana. The majority of the containers’ contents end up in Ghana’s scrap yards to be crushed and burned by unprotected workers. Some traders report that to get a shipping container with a few working computers they must accept broken junk like old screens in the same container from exporters in developed countries.

What’s the solution?

While working computers and mobile phones can have a new lease of life in some African countries, they create pollution when thrown away due to the high levels of toxic chemicals they contain. This is why we are pressuring the biggest electronic companies to phase out toxic chemicals and introduce global recycling schemes. Both of these steps are vital to tackle the growing tide of toxic e-waste.

Some companies are making progress towards taking responsibility for the entire lifecycle of their products. However, Philips and Sharp stand out for refusing to accept that they are responsible for recycling their old products. The stance of these powerful multinationals is ensuring there will always be a digital divide that they prefer remains hidden, a dangerous divide with unprotected workers in developing countries left with the toxic legacy.

Behind the story

Mid-2008 a Greenpeace team including campaigner Kim Schoppink and photographer Kate Davison went to Ghana to document and gather evidence of what really happens to our electronic waste.

How an advertising slogan invented by Madison Avenue executives in 1948 has come to define our most intimate rituals and ideals around courtship and marriage is the subject of this devastating documentary. THE DIAMOND EMPIRE, which sent shockwaves through the world diamond industry when it first appeared, systematically takes apart the myth that “diamonds are forever,” exposing how one white South African family, through a process of monopoly and fantasy, managed to exert control over the global flow of diamonds and shape the very way we think about romance and love is an achievement all the more stunning given that diamonds are in fact neither a scarce nor indestructible commodity. Zeroing in on how “the diamond empire” managed to convert something valueless into one of the most coveted commodities in history, the film provides a riveting look at how marketing and consumer culture not only influence global trade and economics, but also burrow down into the very core of our identities. Most of the major diamond producers belong to, or have cooperated with, the De Beers led marketing cartel, formed to maintain the price of diamonds at a high level. De Beers, under Harry Oppenheimer’s leadership, maintained its dominant position in the industry by using its numerous worldwide companies to buy up new sources of diamonds and to control distribution of industrial diamonds and production of synthetic ones. In the last decades of the 20th cent., however, De Beers’ hold over the unpolished diamond market decreased, and in 2000 the company announced it would end to its policy of controlling diamond prices through hoarding and shift its focus to increasing sales.

“In all my years of teaching, this is the single most important video I have ever shown. No film has proven as successful in showing students how a major part of their identities has been constructed by a corporate, commercial culture. This movie changes the way we see the world.”
– Sut Jhally | Department of Communications | UMass AmherstSource: http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=136#film-praise

A shocking investigation into uranium mining in Africa. We visit three areas affected by the uranium industry; Mounana where activity has now ceased, Arlit, where the mines have been active for 40 years, and Imouraren, a future site.

French energy giant Areva pulled out of Mounana, Gabon, in 1999. The uranium mine, Comuf, was closed down and covered over. In fact, at a glance, it’s almost as if the mine never existed. However, Mounana suffers from extremely dangerous levels of radioactive pollution. The soil and the rivers are toxic; even the houses have a Geiger count as much as 8 times the safe limit. They were built using radioactive material. In Arlit, North Niger, we encounter similar problems, including an abnormally high incidence of lung cancer. Now that Areva has left, the former miners are left to pay for their own health care.

In spite of the horrific damage to local populations at previous sites, another mine is being constructed, in Imouraren. The result of a colossal deal between the governments of France and Niger, this will be their biggest open mine yet. Areva claims that the new mine will not poison the land, but local people are sceptical

Wednesday 4 April 2007, by Saïd Aït-Hatrit in Afrik.com
Source: www.afrik.com/article11482.htm
Wednesday, scientists, jurists, doctors, and victims drew up overwhelming allegations concerning uranium exploitation activities of the French Areva Company in Nigeria and Gabon. Considered opaque in its information management, the ex-Cogema is accused of knowingly exposing its employees and the inhabitants of its mining zones to important levels of radioactive contamination.

On Wednesday in Paris jurists, scientists, doctors (Médecins du monde), and representatives of Victims Associations from the Arlit and Mounana mines in Gabon, shut down since 1999, presented their conclusions stemming from three years of investigation.

“We have very serious reasons to believe that Africans and French expatriates became ill due solely to Areva’s negligence” in matters of health and environmental protection, explained William Bourdon, president and founder of the Sherpa Association.

The Nigerian singer Abdallah Oumbadougou had explained last November in Afrik, during an interview, that he was thinking about leaving his hometown, Arlit, 250 Km to the north of Agadez, because he feared for the health of his family. Guizmo, his French musical partner in the Désert Rebel Collective, had told him about a press report according to which the exploitation of Arlit’s uranium mine by Areva (ex Cogema) could be responsible for the pollution of drinking water and for numerous deaths in the region.

Broadcast by the private Canal + Channel, in 2004, it showed the Sherpa International Jurists Association and the team of scientists from Criirad (Commission de recherche et d’information indépendantes sur la radioactivité – Independent research commission for information on radioactivity) during their first mission in 2003, concerning the situation of workers from the ex-Cogema in Arlit. Airlit is a city built in the 70s in the middle of the desert for the exploitation of the precious ore that now has 70,000 inhabitants.

Radioactive waste “in the open air”

According to the accusing associations gathered together on Wednesday in Paris, Areva and its subsidiaries – Somaïr and Cominak in Nigeria, Comuf in Gabon – voluntarily left their employees in ignorance about the risks involved with working in the mines.

“It was only in 1986 that we began to be aware”, explained Almoustapha Alhacen, a worker in the Arlit mines and president of Aghir N’Man, the Nigerian Association for the protection of the Environment. Founded in 2000, it called for Criirad’s help in 2003 to evaluate the radiological situation on site. “We saw our friends die and didn’t know why” he recalled.

After having failed to forbid the exploratory mission at Arlit, the Cominak manager succeeded in confiscating the scientist’s measurement equipment at the Niamey customhouse, according to the associations’ report. However, the scientists succeeded in preserving some of the instruments and their findings were conclusive: “The contamination level of the drinking water system is well over WHO standards”, stated Bruno Chareyron, director of Criirad. The scientific laboratory also measured the highly contaminated scrap iron on the city’s market and noted that the radioactive waste (500,000 Becquerels per kilogram) was stored in the open air “exposed to winds and all types of runoff.”

Areva has no occupational diseases

Areva responded to the Criirad’s controls with measurements carried out by its own experts who found no contamination of the Arlit water supply, according to Bruno Chareyron, who regrets this strategy of pure denial. The associations’ report claims that Areva’s aim is to make it impossible to establish a chain of causation between exposure to radiation and the diseases developed, which could be very costly for the company. For this reason Areva has kept the results of its investigations secret, just as they did with those carried out in 1986 at Mounana.

Jacqueline Gaudet spent 15 years of her life in this town. In 2005, she founded Mounana, an association of expatriated former mine workers, “for the simple and good reason that there are too many cases of cancer among expatriates,” she explained Wednesday.

She herself lost first her husband, then her father and mother because of cancer over a period of 10 years after having returned to France. Areva told her that they were not responsible for her father’s illness and death from lung cancer linked to exposure to radon, as he was insured for this illness by the Gabonese social security system. Moreover she has had no access to medical records. Under these circumstances, “it’s easy for Areva to say that there was no occupational disease involved,” she sadly stated.

Sustainable development at the heart of Areva’s strategy”

On 16 March, anticipating the media hype prepared by the associations, Areva announced its wish to create “health-watch programs on its mining sites”. “A positive breakthrough that we should respond to with all the necessary precautions,” stated Sherpa’s vice-president. As for Almoustapha Alhacen: “I must admit that I don’t trust them as they are experts in publicity”, he explained looking rather embarrassed.

In the press release announcing the proposal, Areva assured that they put “sustainable development at the heart of their strategy”, and also contributes to “having an answer to the important issues of the 21st Century: the preservation of the planet and accountability to future generations.”

Sherpa, which already pressured Total into compensating Burmese workers, has warned that they have at their disposal enough elements to be able to initiate “one or several long and complex civil procedures” in France.

Anti-Areva protests in Niger supported by several thousand people – AFP
09.10.07, 3:44 AM ET
PARIS (Thomson Financial) – Several thousand people took part in a demonstration in Nigerian capital Niamey on Saturday, calling for the departure of French nuclear energy group Areva from the country and also opposing a claim by Libya to part of the country’s territory, according to an Agence France-Presse journalist.
The demonstrators, who acted with government approval, marched through the city and held a meeting in front of the parliament building.
For the past 40 years, Areva (other-otc: ARVCF.PK – news – people ) has been operating an open-cast uranium mine in Arlit, northern Niger, and an underground one nearby. Areva obtained 43 pct of its uranium supply from Niger last year, according to France’s Nuclear Energy Agency.
Niger, rated the poorest country in the world, is the third-largest producer of uranium with a 9 pct global market share.
MP Sannoussi Jackou told the meeting the protest was against French state-controlled Areva rather than the country or the government. The company has extracted 100,000 tonnes of uranium without Niger getting the benefit, he said.
The protest against Libya was in relation to a claim of ownership of part of the Mangueni plateau, where oil prospecting is taking place.
Areva investment certificates fell 6.2 pct to 680 eur on Friday after plans for the demonstration were unveiled, but an analyst with a French bank said the key factor in the drop was an announcement by the chairman of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd that his company will target the Indian market.
Other reasons for the decline were a fall in the price of aluminium, the making of which requires heavy use of electricity, and the previously revealed delays in the construction by Areva of the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland, the analyst said.

Background into the TOXIC DUMPINGS in SOMALIA that has been going for the past 2 decades. This videos illustrates the main players responsible for the dumpings, and the complacency shown by the western countries to this systematic rape of the Somali coastline.

Pirates ruled Somalia’s waves last year, but a greater crime is still being perpetrated by the multinational companies using the mainland as a toxic dumping ground. Chris Milton reports

The pirates of Somalia became bandits of international notoriety during 2008, hijacking ever more prolific targets, including arms ships, oil tankers and cruise liners, and extracting huge ransoms from their owners.

National governments and NGOs decried their actions as an affront to international maritime law, but few examined the pirates’ claim that a far greater crime continues in Somalia: the illegal dumping of toxic waste.

For more than 10 years, environmental and human rights organisations have called on the international community to act to stop this dumping, but successive wars have ensured the crisis has only deepened. Now, as Ethiopian troops withdraw from Somalia and the piracy becomes more subdued, there is hope the issue can be properly investigated and resolved.

In 1997, in the Italian magazine Famiglia Cristiana, Greenpeace published a landmark investigation into the dumping, which showed that it started in the late 1980s, and exposed Swiss and Italian companies as brokers for the transportation of hazardous waste from Europe to dumps in Somalia. Subsequent research has also shown that the company employed physically to ship the waste was wholly owned by the Somali government.

When Somalia slipped into civil war in 1992, the waste exporters had to negotiate with local clan warlords, who demanded guns and ammunition to allow the dumping to continue. Many of the ships, having brought weapons or waste, then became trawlers, and left Somali waters with holds full of tuna for onward sale.

An investigation into the murder of the Italian journalist Ilaria Alpi in Somalia in 1994 quotes the warlord Boqor Musa as saying, ‘It is evident those ships carried military equipment for different factions involved in the civil war’, and it is widely believed that Alpi was assassinated because she had incontrovertible evidence of the guns-for-waste trade.

The Greenpeace report briefly made the news and was followed up by the European Green Party tabling a question in the European Parliament about ‘the dumping of toxic waste from German, French and Italian nuclear power plants and hospitals’ in Somalia.

It also prompted a large investigation in Italy, a former colonial power in Somalia. This concluded that around 35 million tonnes of waste had been exported to Somalia for only $6.6 billion, leading the environmental group Legambiente to assert Somalia’s inland waste dumps are ‘among the largest in the world’.

The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 served to reinvigorate interest in the continued dumping of hazardous waste in Somalia. Rusting tanks of unidentifiable ooze were washed up on to beaches; villagers began to die of unexplained illnesses and coastal ecosystems collapsed.

In 2005, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) concluded its own on-the-ground investigation in Somalia. Despite being stymied by local political interests and finding no tangible proof, it concluded that the ‘dumping of toxic and harmful waste is rampant in the sea, on the shores and in the hinterland’.

A year later the Somali multi-clan NGO Daryeel Bulsho Guud conducted its own survey. With greater local co-operation, it was able to identify 15 containers of ‘confirmed nuclear and chemical wastes’ in eight coastal areas.

At the same time, the UN and World Bank put together a Joint Needs Assessment (JNA) to plan for Somalia’s return to functioning nationhood. Updated in 2008, it recommends $42.1 million be set aside for environmental activities, including ensuring all ‘toxic waste [is] found and removed’. It doesn’t address the cost of human suffering, however, and ignores the fact that the dumping of toxic waste in Somalia continues to this day.

Field research in Somalia by Zainab Hassan, a former fellow at the University of Minnesota and Environmental Justice Advocate, has brought to light a whole range of chronic and acute illnesses suffered by Somalis.

These include severe birth defects, such as the absence of limbs, and widespread cancers. One local doctor said he had treated more cases of cancer in one year than he had in his entire professional career before the tsunami.

‘Firms are illegally dumping hazardous and nuclear waste,’ says Zainab Hassan. ‘The international community should do something in terms of cleaning up, and those responsible should be brought to justice.’

EcoTerra, an NGO with strong connections within Somalia, agrees, though it refuses to name the companies involved or their countries of origin. Possibly with one eye upon the assassination of Ilaria Alpi, it describes the situation as ‘deadly’.

The UN’s Special Representative for the region, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, is similarly sensitive. He confi rms that dumping continues on the Somali coast, likening the situation to the shipping of blood diamonds from Liberia and Sierra Leone. His office refuses to name which NGOs he’s asked to investigate the issue, however, presumably for their own protection, or the companies suspected of being involved.

Bringing those responsible for the dumping to justice may be hard. Under EU regulations 259/93 and 92/3/Euratom, the originating country is responsible for disposing of its medical and nuclear waste, as well as for its retrieval if it is disposed of illegally.

With many of the containers unmarked and much of the paperwork probably long since lost or destroyed, however, it will take a lot to enable any legal action to take place.

In addition, a UNDP source described the search for hazardous material in Somalia as like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s not that they don’t know it’s there, he says, but that they don’t know where to start looking for it.

This makes it all the more urgent that stability return to the country. Only then will the dumping stop and the clean-up commence.